Hi I know this is weird, but are you adopted? I think you might be my sister from my mom’s side. The message popped onto my iPhone on a late February morning. Rebecca Langston lived in Kings County, one town over from where I was born and lived until age 12. We shared 21% of our DNA.

Hello! I typed eagerly in response. I am adopted! I was born in Hanford in 1985 … pretty much immediately put with my adoptive parents.

Do you know your parents’ names? Rebecca asked. My mother was Sylvia Flores. I was told I had a sister a few years older than me that was adopted before I was born. My aunt who adopted me said my sister’s name was Seferiana.

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I knew I was adopted from my earliest consciousness. Being an adoptee was simply part of who I was. Growing up a child of the 1980s and 90s, white adoptive families incorporated their brown adopted children into their own, and simply moved on with life. 

My parents fostered me as a baby, and adopted me in 1988. My mom has recounted meeting my birth mother, a nice Mexican woman with a heroin addiction that would cost her the custody of multiple children and the life of at least one. For two that remained, she relied on other family members to raise them. 

“I had fostered older kids, and loved that. But I always deep down wanted a baby,” my mother recalled during a recent visit to Seattle. “When CPS called asking if I would take a drug infant, of course I said yes!” She gingerly handed me a purple folder of documents and settled into the hot pink chair in my home office. Interspersed among report cards and class photos were the records from the days after my birth, and the two years leading up to my adoption.

My CPS records described a mother who arrived hours late to the hospital for scheduled feedings, who admitted to using heroin the day I was born. After a stint in a short-term foster placement, I went to live with my new foster family, the Days. As months passed and it became clear that Sylvia was not on the path to sobriety, she relinquished parental rights, and my foster parents began the legal process toward adoption.

In elementary school I began facing questions from classmates: “What are you? Where are you from?” I never quite knew how to answer them. I knew that my birth mother was Mexican, but even the Mexican kids didn’t think I belonged to them. When a friend asked if I was “mixed” like her, I replied, “yeah, I guess so.” That must be it. For years I found home in the ambiguity of “mixed.” Despite living in a town with a large Mexican population, I never felt like I belonged, and a gap widened between my culture and who I was becoming.

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In December 2021, I submitted my DNA to Ancestry.com, searching for answers and secretly searching for family. Rebecca’s message landed in my inbox, and I felt a jolt of excitement and disbelief.

My mother’s name was Sylvia, I chatted back.

Yup, you’re my older sister, she said.